BYOD Part 1-Defining Users

Do you manage IT for an elementary school district, or a college or university? If so, you are undoubtedly seeing more frequent use of personal devices. There is business value in this rapidly growing practice of users wanting to gain access to your network using their device of choice – are you prepared?

When contemplating a solution set or policy switch to a personal device such as a tablet or smartphone, there are some key things to remember. Before you make a decision on what infrastructure to invest in, first look deeper at your users, the devices and available solutions, and then weigh both the benefits and obstacles you will encounter. Keep in mind that each user will require different access, use different devices, and generate their own sets of issues and benefits.

We’ve divided these users into three categories, let’s take a look:

Students: This group will be more invested in new technologies and less willing to use second-rate or “borrowed” tech in the classroom. They also have a deeper desire to be connected and collaborate electronically. The user set within this group varies greatly; for example, middle school students require different solutions and access than high school students. In a university or college setting, graduate students may have different tools available to them than their undergraduate counterparts.

Teachers: Teachers are bringing their own devices into the classroom, and not just for personal use. Tablet and smartphone use to run presentations and manage in-class participation are practically required by some schools. This trend is likely to grow, and determining your teachers’ needs and capabilities is paramount to a successful implementation.

The good news here is that teachers using their own devices can not only save your institution money, but can enhance the educational process for your students. Advanced presentation styles, greater sense of ownership, and “always-on” connectivity with students can help your teachers make a profound connection with their learning community.

Staff: Your administrative staff can be the most vocal and have the most to gain in accessing school systems through personal devices. Allowing access to student data records, attendance charts, personnel forms and other information needed on an ad hoc basis can increase productivity and efficiency tremendously, which can result in less training and more usage with reduced capital investment.

Remember to also include your maintenance and other support teams in this category. Rather than supplying cell phones and paying for usage, why not allow staff to use their own cell phones, or even connect seamlessly with Wi-Fi to your internal PBX, thus saving you mobile charges altogether.

Each of the user types in your environment are unique and should be treated as such. Identifying who will be granted access to your network, and the scope of that access before you make deployment decisions is critical in preventing unnecessary network tampering and security risks. Now that we’ve identified users, the next post will take a look at available devices and best application practices.

Today IT professionals and businesses in general understand the importance of unified communications (UC). Information speed is faster than ever – and continuously accelerating, so your information stream needs to be able to keep up. Whether it’s presence, voice, data, chat, video, messaging or email, everything needs to be synchronized. Using Session Initiation Protocol (SIP)as a part of your UC deployment is something that should be considered during the planning process – if you haven’t already jumped onto the SIP bandwagon.

SIP trunking isn’t new, but it has seen a considerable increase in adoption in recent years. Initially used as a form of business continuity or redundancy to traditional T1/PRI lines in the enterprise space, SIP trunking is now commonly viewed as a secure way to reduce costs. These cost savings, along with the productivity gains, are often considered as part of the business case for UC. Of course, traditional benefits such as improved customer service and satisfaction, along with reduced travel are often sited too.

The addition of SIP end point applications enable benefits like single number reach and extending enterprise communications to mobile employees. SIP provides a way to identify and set up various forms of communication sessions among endpoints capable of supporting a simple software client, over any kind of wired or wireless link. The value in SIP is that it enhances interoperability, provides alternatives, and promotes portability across telecommunications and applications. Combining mobility with presence and availability information accelerate collaboration and problem resolution. These are often key elements in the user-specific requirements in a UC deployment project.

As you consider your UC deployment, and define the goals of the project, take care not to overlook the flexibility of SIP applications and lower costs of SIP trunks. Not only do SIP trunks play a valuable role in building a justification based on cost savings and the business value of UC, they add to executive buy-in and user adoption, which is key in any successful project.

Unified communications (UC) is about connecting employees, business partners and clients with information in an efficient, collaborative workplace. Today’s users expect complete compatibility across all interfaces, including tablets and smart devices. A communication framework that can accomplish these aims must be reliable, secure and, above all, extremely versatile.

If implemented successfully, UC will yield results across an entire company. The existing business will adapt more immediately to market changes, and new products will be envisioned and brought to market in a much shorter time frame.

Three approaches to unified communications that stand out as presenting the greatest, most effective opportunities for the forward looking company are: expanded voice systems, enhanced desktop functionality and communications-enabled business processes. However, every business situation is unique and faces its own set of challenges as it relates to UC adoption. Selecting a partner that can provide a customized approach utilizing any number of techniques is the ideal way to meet your specific requirements.

Expanded Voice Systems

Voice communication systems are easily the most used (and sometimes overlooked) communication tool. The addition of web collaboration, audio and video conferencing, presence, instant message, support for mobile devices and the integration of business applications can substantially improve the usefulness of your voice communications system. These options are varied but always versatile, scalable and cost effective. This approach also allows you to take advantage of your voice system and integrate elements of UC with installed desktop applications.

Enhanced Desktop Functionality

You can choose to add elements of unified communications (instant message, presence, and click-to-call) to desktop applications such as e-mail and calendar. Desktop applications are an obvious necessity to any successful business, as they provide the interface to, and are the focus of, all the information systems of the business. This information is the lifeline of your business, and enhancing access to them is imperative.

Communications-Enabled Business Processes (CEBP)

A picture is worth a thousand words. This statement is as true in business as anywhere else. Integrating your core business applications with your communications network can allow your employees, partners and clients to experience rather than just read the information you want communicated. Simply put, representations of complicated or highly technical information can be portrayed as images. Everyone from sales associates to senior management will benefit tremendously from the ability to quickly grasp and adapt to this information and use it to act more decisively.

These benefits encompass all business departments and industries. Every department will be able to make rapid, informed decisions based on the same information and, if needed, further detail is always available on the system. Industries as diverse as manufacturing and education as well as government offices can be confident in their ability to communicate across every user interface.

While the market definition of UC seems to be ever evolving, the drivers remain constant. The value of UC is most evident when one recognizes the vast amounts of information that are communicated across formerly separate communications technologies. But the true value is reaped when, as a result of UC implementation, innovation, collaboration and teamwork are all enhanced and significantly increase the efficiency of a business.

Ongoing traffic maintenance is critical to the success of a well formed traffic management strategy. You must continually monitor your call flows to ensure that the patterns have not changed.

In most cases, weekly or daily traffic reports are run and analysis performed to ensure that no busy conditions are occurring. If they do occur, it is imperative that you first check to see that this is not due to a fault such as a downed T1 that has reduced the number of available trunks on the route. If this is not the case, then a traffic problem exists and needs to be immediately accounted for.

Call Center environments are especially sensitive to traffic problems. In call center environments, an aggressive traffic management strategy should be implemented and diligently attended to. The voice administrator needs to have exposure to everything that is going on related to that route to properly troubleshoot issues or plan for growth.

What information will I need to assess my trunking needs?

Depending on the needs of your organization, the types of traffic information you find valuable will determine which traffic types you should collect and store. For example, peg count and call second usage information can be collected for many different types of traffic based items including trunk utilization, station statistics, group usages, attendant statistics and call center information.

Another traffic type that can be collected is the VoIP statistics information as it relates to any number of different IP based voice devices throughout your communications solution. This information is based on the Real-time Transport Protocol (RTP) packets that are passed between the devices throughout the course of a conversation. This data is valuable because it tells an administrator how much bandwidth is currently being consumed by voice traffic and over which network segments that information is flowing. It is beneficial in aiding network capacity planning efforts or in troubleshooting problems experienced with VoIP implementations.

Once you’ve collected the data, determining how much you should store will be dependent on your organization’s business needs. Every business is different, but each business likely experiences peaks and valleys in call volumes. If you experience higher traffic volumes on certain trunk routes at certain times during the year, be sure to plan to store enough traffic data to cover those peaks.
Regardless of your particular situation, traffic issues and trunking errors are costly and can potentially damage your organization’s reputation. Knowing the fundamentals of traffic management and coupling that with the right tools is the key to an effective traffic management strategy.

There’s no question that your organization’s communications system is critical to your business. But did you know that traffic management is a key component to ensuring your unified communications solution is running at its peak performance? While trunking is a common “fix” and contributes to the functionality of your UC solution, if not done properly it can be both costly and damaging to your organization. Read ahead to learn more about identifying and fixing common traffic problems that could very well be inhibiting your communications solution, and ultimately your business.

First, identify your problem…

Is your route Over-Trunked?

If so, then you have too many voice channels dedicated to a particular trunk route. This is costly for your organization because you are paying for service and equipment that is not needed.

Is your route Under-Trunked?

If so, then you have too few voice channels dedicated to a particular trunk route. Under-trunking can lead to a loss in productivity by your employees because those needing to dial out won’t be able to. Additionally, when customers are trying to dial into your office, they may hear a busy signal, which could potentially frustrate and cause them to take their business elsewhere – this can damage your company’s brand reputation or customer loyalty.

Are you experiencing VoIP Traffic Problems?

Voice over IP (VoIP) traffic problems are the result of a lack of bandwidth across a routed network link. This will lead to bad quality calls that are choppy or have a great deal of delay. None of these symptoms are at all desirable because they lead to garbled and confusing phone conversations and generally poor perception of the communications solution.

Traffic related problems are also costly for your business because you’re paying for equipment and service that you don’t need. They can also lead to the following problems for your organization: lost potential revenue, lost brand reputation, lost customer loyalty and lost productivity.

Now that you’ve identified the problem, how will you fix it?

Stay tuned for the next post where we’ll discuss how to resolve your traffic problems.